Clouds can provide users with a number of different benefits

Many businesses large and small use cloud computing today either directly (e.g. Google or Amazon) or indirectly (e.g. Twitter) instead of traditional on-site alternatives. There are a number of reasons why cloud computing is so widely used among businesses today.

Reduction of costs

Unlike on-site hosting the price of deploying applications in the cloud can be less due to lower costs associated with acquiring the hardware infrastructure.

Universal Access

Cloud computing can allow remotely located employees to access applications and work via the internet.

Administrative Services

Services to manage a given application can be contracted which will help prevent running into talent acquisition issues, and will free up your IT staff to work on more business oriented tasks.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a provision model in which an organization outsources the equipment used to support operations, including storage, hardware, servers and networking components. The service provider owns the equipment and is responsible for housing, running and maintaining it. The client typically pays on a per-use basis.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a way to rent hardware, operating systems, storage and network capacity over the Internet. The service delivery model allows the customer to rent virtualized servers and associated services for running existing applications or developing and testing new ones.